Growing up I didn't think girls could be funny. Now as an adult, I make my female characters hilarious.

• Growing up, I felt like only my dad and my brothers could be funny.
• I could be anything: a teacher, a ballerina, or a doctor, but not funny.

Growing up, I understood that girls could be anything. I wanted to be a ballerina, a doctor, and a teacher. It came as a rude shock to learn girls couldn't be everything. You're telling me I had to choose?

But of all the things I thought I could be, one possibility never occurred to me: being funny.

I didn't crack jokes. My dad was funny, and my brothers were funny. But me, the only girl? It didn't compute. I was raised in the shoulder-padded 1980s, but subtle expectations still held. I knew I should be ladylike, not guffawing.

So I giggled at jokes told by boys. It wasn't until adulthood that I realized I could make people laugh, too. Even now, watching my kids grow up — and to grossly generalize — I see more boys jockeying to be class clowns while more girls remain in the audience.

I realized the funny characters in books are always male

Let's start here: Name your favorite funny picture book for our youngest kids. Is the protagonist female? The writer or illustrator? Is the protagonist a female human?

When my children were young and we began reading picture books, I noticed how much my kids loved to laugh at funny books — and how nearly all of those funny books starred male characters. Even funny dinosaurs or crayons or eggs tended to be male.

I started substituting female pronouns as I read — after all, my kids couldn't read yet. They laughed just as hard if I turned Max into Maxine.

To me, changing the text made the difference feel even more pronounced. Fairy tales and fables were full of boys. Our laugh-out-loud favorites nearly all featured male main characters. The occasional funny girl in a picture book was usually a princess.

I want to make sure girls know they can be funny too

I have nothing against funny boys, dragons, or inanimate objects, but the stories we tell our youngest kids shape their understanding of the world — and themselves. Girls are learning through picture books that they can be daring, ambitious, and brave. They should know that they can be goofy, too. And as a mother of boys, I want them to understand that girls can be funny and fierce, just as boys can be tender and loving.

It might feel frivolous to worry about whether girls can be funny when there's so much else to worry about. The world is crumbling and schools are banning more and more books — denying children access to books that encourage inclusiveness, social-emotional learning, and more.

Kids need all of those books.

But don't forget the funny — it's often how kids learn to love reading, and how they learn to take themselves, and their problems, less seriously. It's a way to relieve stress, bond, and have more fun.

My debut picture book, "How to Be a Rock Star," features a funny girl learning to rock out despite a pesky brother with too many wardrobe malfunctions. I hope some girl, somewhere, reads it and knows she can be funny, too.

Lisa Tolin is a journalist and the author of "How to Be a Rock Star," illustrated by Daniel Duncan (Putnam, 2022).